Commodity supercomputing, was: Re: NDAs Re: [Beowulf] Nvidia, cuda, tesla and... where's my double floating point?

[Dan.Kidger at quadrics.com]

John is correct here.

It is one thing to do long range climate prediction yourself using distributed computing and tweaking the stochastics based on a set of starting conditions, and another to try and work out if it will be sunny next Tuesday.
Weather modelling is a different animal to CP- you need a supply of fresh input data - and a sophisticated infrastructure to harvest , collate, sanitise and feed these numbers into your computer model.

Also with CP you typically run many instances concurrently which takes weeks/months to complete, but with WM, you have maybe 6 hours to run the whole job from start to finish which implies a closely coupled cluster.



Daniel

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Dr. Daniel Kidger, Quadrics Ltd.   daniel.kidger at quadrics.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of John Hearns
Sent: 30 June 2008 23:23
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: Commodity supercomputing, was: Re: NDAs Re: [Beowulf] Nvidia, cuda, tesla and... where's my double floating point?

On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 20:20 +0200, Toon Moene wrote:

>
> Since about a year, it's been clear to me that weather forecasting
> (i.e., running a more or less sophisticated atmospheric model to provide
> weather predictions) is going to be "mainstream" in the sense that every
> business that needs such forecasts for its operations can simply run
> them in-house.

Garbage in, garbage out.

By that I mean that the CPU horsepower may be more and more readily
affordable for businesses like that - let's say it is an ice-cream
wholesaler who would like to have a three day forecast to allow stocking
of their outlets with ice cream.
However, the models depend on input from sensor networks - not my area
of expertise, but I should imagine manned and unmanned weather stations,
ocean buoys to measure wave height, satellite sensors.
Do we see such data sources being made freely available, and in real
time (ie not archived data sets)??










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